Recently, some of the press coverage of the Mandela Effect has been surprisingly open-minded, and sometimes downright favorable.
But, at other times… Well, not so much.
For example, I almost liked this article about what makes something memorable… or forgettable.
Well, it looked favorable when – rushed – I’d skimmed it.
Then I reread it and… wow, clever phrasing, manipulating the context. For example, labeling it a “false memory” from the start. (See more at my post: The Mandela Effect: What Do We Really Remember?)
And then, writing that post – whew! – I stumbled onto this quirky paper, Fathoming the Mandela Effect: Deploying Reinforcement Learning to Untangle the Multiverse. That was fun to read.
But anyway, yes, I’ve decided to try putting the Mandela Effect website back online.
It’s still a work-in-progress, and – of course – it may fail.
First, we had to find hosting able to handle ridiculously high levels of traffic that the site can attract.
Then, we needed a way to justify the high hosting costs that may become necessary.
(My related books aren’t exactly flying off the shelves, but I never expected them to. The only reason I published them was to make sure people have access to how the Mandela Effect topic started, and what people said at the beginning.)
For now, there will be advertising on the website; I’ll have no control over that content, but my hosting bills should remain manageable. That’s the important part, for now.
The next big hurdle will be the comments.
Currently, we’re talking about adding a new post every 7 – 10 days, and then keeping that post (and perhaps a few others) open to comments for a short amount of time. Like a week or two. Maybe three.
As before, all comments will be moderated, but this time, they’ll be moderated every few days. (In other words, no more six-hour days, reading endless comments, and many of them left by trolls.)
It may be a bit of a juggling act, keeping the site online and the conversations calm and interesting. We’ll see how it goes.
This might work out. Or it might not. Fingers crossed!
P.S. These aren’t our kinds of memories, but if you’re using an LLM like ChatGPT, be aware of how memories may be injected, manipulated, and exploited. Here’s one article: Hacker plants false memory in ChatGPT to steal user data in perpetuity.